OPEN AIR MEDIA FESTIVAL
Open Air Media Festival is an outdoor media arts program hosted at PS1 in Iowa City. Our annual festival invites the public to experience video, performance, installation, sound, and other media arts in communal, accessible locations.
Participating Artists: Installations and Performances (Iowa-based)
Auden Lincoln-Vogel, Emily Berkheimer, Devlin Caldwell, Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder, Johanna Winters and Sarah Minor, Daniel Fine and Dana Keeton, M Denney, Stephanie Miracle, Jeremy Chen, Ellen Oliver, Dorian Dean, Johanna Kasimow, Jacob Smithburg
Participating Artists: Film/Video Screening (Midwest/Prairie Region)
Oona Taper, Sonnie Wooden, Serena JV Elston, Rudolf Lingens, Ernest Strauhal, Rafaella Las, Jordy Brazo, Lya Finston, Katina Bitsicas, Jason Bernagozzi, Ellen Mueller, Lorelei d'Andriole, Caleb Mehl, London Huser, Sara Eliot Steuer, Jonathan Johnson, Laura Farahzad Mayer, Toby Kaufmann-Buhler, Jenelle Stafford
The 2023 Open Air Media Festival is generously supported by • Iowa Arts Council, a division of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs • City of Iowa City Public Art Program • Veridian Credit Union
2023 Installations and Performances:
Johanna Winters and Sarah Minor, Hag Cycle is a collaborative performance that uses shadow theater to engage a contemporary audience. The performers, Johanna Winters and Sarah Minor, are artists working across disciplines who are interested in using analog technologies to think about how image, text, and sound work in tandem, live. This performance will extend the traditional methods of shadow theater by utilizing vintage overhead projectors and two 6 x 6’ scrims. The audience will be seated outside of the screens, while the projected silhouetted imagery is animated from within. A live score, performed by composer, Ramin Roshandel, and a sequence of dialogue recited by the performers, will provide the soundscape. These three layers – image, text and sound – will prompt the audience to consider themes of isolation, invisibility, ugliness, and the history of “ululation,” a vocalization of grief once considered too offensive to be heard within a city’s walls, suitable only for wilderness.
Johanna Winters is an artist, educator, and puppeteer currently based in Iowa City. Her work engages printmaking, puppetry, video, performance, and sculpture to consider the condition of a puppet-protagonist who performs her sensuality for the camera. Winter’s work has been exhibited and performed nationally – recently at the H & R Block Artspace (Kansas City, MO), Charlotte Street, (Kansas City, MO). Drama Club (Chicago, IL), and Coop Gallery (Nashville, TN). She is a 2022 recipient of the Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Award, and is the current Grant Wood Fellow in Printmaking at the University of Iowa School of Art & Art History.
Sarah Minor is an interdisciplinary artist and the author of three books including Slim Confessions, winner of the 2021 Noemi Press Prize, Bright Archive (Rescue Press 2020), winner of the Big Other Nonfiction Book Award, and The Persistence of the Bonyleg, a chapbook from Essay Press. Minor is the recipient of the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, an Individual Research Grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Her work has been collected in places like Best American Experimental Writing, Advanced Creative Nonfiction, and A Harp in the Stars.
Auden Lincoln-Vogel, LOOKLOOKLOOK… is an expanded cinema performance (for one audience member at a time) using a 16mm film that is back-projected on the viewer’s eyelids.
Auden Lincoln-Vogel is a filmmaker whose work spans both animation and live action. His films have been screened at festivals including the Cannes Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, Black Nights Film Festival, Filmfest Dresden, and the European Media Arts Festival. He currently teaches and makes films in Iowa. More of his work can be found at audenlincolnvogel.com
Devlin Caldwell, Born and Bred is a proposed large scale, 3D Printed installation consisting of 10 life sized corn stalks made up of around 360 3D prints in total, wherein the kernels on the ears of corn have been replaced with the heads of babies. Each stalk contains two ears, viewers are invited to walk through the installation and take in the surreal form. As each corn stalk is built to the same specifications, this work is an exploration into the homogenous ritual and culture of the Midwest region, questioning the perceived sameness in practices such as fashion, religion, cuisine, and even ritualistic practices such as the Midwest Goodbye. Through surrealism and humor, this work examines the conformist practices, combined with the notion of the Midwest as being a major source of agriculture [Corn], with the ideals of the nuclear family, and reproduction/procreation being normalized, and even encouraged in some circles, while the idea of being childless is still considered radicalized. Viewers will be able to walk into this installation, and see 10 duplicate life sized corn stalks made of 3D prints and wood, painted in a shade of green reminiscent of John Deere. This work is static, and is meant to surround the viewer as they ponder their relationship to the Midwest, their identity, and their values.
Devlin Caldwell is a New Media Artist Living and Working in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at Mount Mercy University since the Fall of 2020. Originally born in Manhattan, KS, he dual majored in Printmaking and Digital Experimental Media at Kansas State University before graduating in 2016. In 2020, he Graduated from the University of Florida with a Master's of Fine arts with a concentration in Art and Technology.
Ellen Oliver, Pulling Plastic is an interactive sculpture installation with projection loop and live feed camera. The words “pulling plastic” come from climbing jargon and translates to climbing on plastic holds. This work moves to deconstruct the binaries of sport and recreation in rock climbing by offering a reimagined form of climbing in a mediated rock landscape. Audiences are invited to place their hand beneath the live feed camera to see their own mediated hands on the rock surface. This project urges audiences to reimagine broader definitions of climbing through deconstructing verticality and route within the sport.
Ellen Oliver’s artistic research traverses the mediums of performance, sculpture, painting, video, and digital design to explore the choreographies of rock climbing. Her research is currently asking, what technologies produce climbing spaces and how do these technologies inform cultural production in climbing? She is interested in the use of plastics in indoor climbing, and often uses climbing gear as materials for her sculptures and costumes. Ellen is invested in making collaborative art with her local climbing community, while also implementing solo research to understand the complexities between her own dance and climbing practice. She believes that studying climbing through dance scholarship offers a unique perspective of climbing as an expressive community practice. Ellen received a Diploma in Contemporary Dance at UNC School of the Arts in 2012 and a BA in Choreography and Performance at Hampshire College in 2016. Ellen is currently an MFA Teaching Assistant in Choreography and an Iowa Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa, where she was a 2021 Public Digital Arts Cluster Grant recipient and Summer Fellow at the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio.
M Denney, Radioplace. Live sound collage featuring a randomly scanning terrestrial radio. Em will live sample, loop, crush, freeze, and otherwise manipulate the audio using a laptop and small synthesizer.
M Denney (sometimes Em, sometimes nothing) is a composer, electronic musician, guitarist, and improvisor. Her practice is autobiographic, and often deals with ideas of “the natural,” the human perspective and place within natural systems, and audio feedback as a model for understanding these systems. They also focus on the use of ritual, repetitive action, and technology as ways of engaging with memory and ideas of the past. She collaborates frequently with Iowa City dance artists, including Christopher-Rasheem McMillan, Stephanie Miracle, and Jennifer Kale. They are a member of composer’s collective This Machine, a member of experimental guitar ensemble Trio Ampliphonic, and she releases ambient music as Lithops.
Jeremy Chen, A trap to catch Greta (installation, performance/event). A large block of ice is contained in a large vintage fishing net and suspended from within a heavy wooden rectangular framework structure on the PS1 outdoor property. The artist will lay under the melting ice (and/or have other ways of interacting with the structure and the net/ice).
Jeremy Chen is an interdisciplinary artist based in Grinnell, Iowa. His recent work focuses on sculptural objects that he interacts with in short performances.
Johanna Kasimow, City In Heat. A hot summer evening inside of a parked car. Unfolding in real time, first through the lens of a dashboard cam, encounters in a car accumulate and combust out of the camera’s view, into the live present. Part drive-in movie, part surveillance voyeurism, part abstracted domestic drama. Performed and co-created with Kate In and Carlos Ferguson.
Johanna Kasimow is a theater artist based in Iowa City. She currently teaches as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Iowa.
Daniel Fine and Dana Keeton, Structured Improvisations for Fog Bubbles and Video Projections is a new experiment featuring a live VJ set of custom videos projected onto bubbles filled with fog.
Creative collaborators and life partners, new media/video artist Daniel Fine and still photographer Dana Keeton create art that explores their interest in natural forms, scale, photography, video and projection.
Daniel is an artist and technologist working in immersive, responsive, mediated environments for interactive users, audiences, and live performance. His work combines traditional forms of storytelling with interactive digital media technologies. Daniel is on faculty at University of Iowa in Theatre, Dance and Public Digital Arts.
Dana is a photographer who enjoys collaborating on large-scale multimedia projects. She is an art psychotherapist in private practice in Iowa City. Working as a therapist and visual artist informs and enriches both practices.
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder, Susto Ritual. Part medical clinic, part botanica, part discount retail store, the environment of _susto ritual_ is a mixed-media performance meant to manifest the modalities of healing I’ve witnessed among my home community in Queens, New York. Susto translates to shock or fear, but carries another definition, “soul wound” (Patrisia Gonzales), and describes the way pain emerges from within a body that has experienced trauma. Even though traditional pan-indigenous rituals to heal susto have been diluted and obfuscated in the relentless colonizations of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the U.S., alternative epistemologies survive through dialogue, shared resources, prayer, divination, and gossip. I do not seek to romanticize these practices or make any claim about Western medicine, but rather to present them in their beauty and absurdity, holding onto the vision and experience of an intricate care network. Susto ritual is divided into three parts. The first is _susto ritual: dialogue_ an interactive performance where people can converse with me about their bodies and I incorporate their stories into three dimensional sculptural material, as a way to materialize the desire to see and touch pain, to make it feel tangible. The second is _maxxed out_, which offers an essential, yet whimsical aspect of the healing process, discount retail shopping, where sculptures of body systems are placed on hangers on a rack. The third is _susto: diagnosis_ a video and mixed-media installation that transforms my body into the blank base for which others can overlay transparencies of anatomical illustrations of organs and systems, annotated with medical terminology alongside my personal and poetic lexicon of how chronic pain manifests in my body.
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder is an Iowa City-based writer, creator, scholar, and dancer from Queens, New York. Her creative work explores the dialogues between the body and identity structures such as latinidad, queerness, social and familial history and gazes into autonomic modes of being. Her writing explores intimacy and performance in social movement activism and how processed of migration have been reflected in literature and art.
Stephanie Miracle, Partial View is a live micro-choreography for the camera. Drawing from New Materialism studies and film theory, this performance piece crafts a live projected short film with objects, body parts, and camera actions with a percussive sound score by Simon Camatta. Dramaturg: Jenna Supp-Montgomerie
Stephanie Miracle is a performer and interdisciplinary artist investigating the intersection between dance, cinema, and everyday public spaces. Her practice as research takes the form of experimental films, site-specific events, sound installations, and live stage performances. Recent choreographic projects have been presented and commissioned by WAM! Festival (IT), Open Look Festival St. Petersburg (RU); Performatica (MX), ES WIRD SOGAR SCHÖN (DE), SzoloDuo Festival (HU), Fiktiva Festival (DE), kunstOrteleven (DE), PS21 Chatham (NY), Dance Place (DC), Yeltsin Center (RU), Omi Dance (NY), Santa Barbara Dance Theater (CA), Ruhrfestspiel Recklinghausen (DE), Companhia de Danca da Almada (PT), Dingle Dance Festival (IE), and ÇATI Çağdaş Dans (TU). Her dance films have been shown at Lincoln Center Dance for Camera, Open Air Media Festival, EnCore: Dance on Film, Reutlingen Museum, Iowa International Dance Festival, RAD Dance Fest, and Bejing International Dance Video Festival. She was a guest choreographer for Folkwang Tanzstudio from 2016 - 19 and is the current director of FAKERS CLUB (2015 - present) an international live-cinema public performance project. She is an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Iowa and a certified teacher of Klein Technique™.
Emily Berkheimer, GOOP is a four-walled, interactive projection installation. This installation uses a Kinect sensor's depth tracking data with Isadora to allow users to simulate planting trees and cleaning up the ocean via hand gestures.
Emily Berkheimer is a digital media artist specializing in interactive installations and projection design. Utilizing game engines and user input technologies, Emily creates immersive experiences that give audience members agency and allow them to explore digital environments in thought provoking ways.
Jacob Smithburg, Kaleidoscope of Remembrance is a living and generative ambient symphony played by plants in realtime. It features a smorgasbord of electronic instruments, synthesizers, and effects pedals that are connected directly to various plant life through electrodes measuring their bioelectric current. These changes in bioelectricity trigger different instruments, notes, chord progressions, pedal effects, tempo changes, etc. to create a generative ambient album produced solely by flora. Audiences are invited to bring their own plants to connect to the audio equipment and listen to their bioelectricity turned sonic!
Jacob Smithburg is a transmedia artist who has worked across a bevy of mediums including; animation, illustration, storyboarding, 3D modeling, special effects and video game design, virtual reality, projection mapping art installations, audio design, playwriting, and critical media analysis!
Dorian Dean, All In A Days Work. Beginning at sundown, ART WORKERS will be busy at work along the ramp, and surrounding the Close House while collecting words from the public to be integrated into sculptural materials. ART WORKERS: Dorian Dean, Jessie Kramer, Sarahann Kolder, Jessica Dzielinski, Ben Dulavitch, Lauren Comito, Anna Dean
Dorian Dean (she/they) was born in Baltimore, Maryland and currently lives and works in Iowa City, Iowa. In 2022 Dorian completed a MFA in Painting and Certificate of Book Arts at the University of Iowa and received their BFA from Tyler School of Art in 2007. Community engagement through building relationships is an essential part of their art practice. Teaching for over 15 years, Dorian uses art as a tool for social change, with the belief that sharing experience in non hierarchical models empowers people to get curious and question whose “rules” really serve them. As curator for the Times Club at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, curation and collaboration has become a way to put this engagement into action. Dorian has taught and developed curriculums at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of art and the Barnes Foundation. Teaching in Baltimore City and the Philadelphia school districts, through community arts organizations such as the Claymobile, a mobile arts program working with incarcerated young adults and inner-city schools. Dorian's work has been shown at the MDW Chicago art fair with Stop Gap Projects, Charles City Art Center, Bisignano Gallery at the University of Dubuque, Iowa, University of Central Missouri Gallery of Art and Design, and has a forthcoming exhibition at SOIL Gallery in Seattle, WA.
Screening Program, 9:00pm - 10:30pm (click on image to learn more about each artist)
Listen to the festival live on KRUI.fm!
KRUI Iowa City is proud to be working with Public Space One and the Media Arts Co-Op to amplify local art and music through community-based radio. The director board, made up of UIowa students, is thrilled to have experimental radio programming that contribute to KRUI as Iowa City’s Sound Alternative. Tune into 89.7 FM or online at KRUI.fm to listen to the sounds of the Open-Air Festival!
About the festival organizers:
Zen Cohen, director, founder and co-curator.
Zen is Assistant Professor of Media Art and Film Studies at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, IA. Her media art practice uses video, digital imaging, performance and installation. She received an MFA in Art Studio at the University of California at Davis and BFA in Media Arts from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. Her work has been exhibited throughout the San Francisco Bay Area at the deYoung Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, SOMarts, The Lab, The Montalvo Center, and nationally at ARTSpace New Haven in CT, Vanity Projects in NY, Public Space One in Iowa City, and internationally at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in the Canary Islands. Her photographs have been published in Hyperallergic, Art Practical, Routledge and Southern Illinois University Press. zencohenprojects.com
“Profile #040717 – Adrian” screen-print, flocking, 24” x 32” 2020
Dana Potter, assistant program director, graphic design lead and co-curator.
Dana is Assistant Professor of Interactive Digital Studies at the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa. She received her MFA in printmaking at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Her work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the United States at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis,Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, GZ Gallery in Chicago, Disjecta Gallery in Portland, Foley Gallery in New York NY, and internationally at “Global Print 2016” in Douro Portugal, Arts Quarter Budapest in Hungary, and CTRL Gallery in Wroclaw, Poland. Her experiences working professionally in mobile applications, interface design, and digital marketing greatly influenced her artistic direction which primarily combines traditional printmaking and biometric technologies.
Festival Archive
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